


Prickly

by fabrega



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Fall of Overwatch, M/M, Plants, Post-Fall of Overwatch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-23
Updated: 2017-03-23
Packaged: 2018-10-09 13:10:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10412874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabrega/pseuds/fabrega
Summary: The hideout of Jesse McCree, notorious outlaw, isn't home. Still, he does his best to make it livable, with a handful of furniture and a small potted cactus.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [smarshtastic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/smarshtastic/gifts).



> McReyes Spring Break, Day 5: Bloom
> 
> For [smarshtastic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/smarshtastic/), who encouraged me to write this and whose excellent last-minute beta work made it possible. Her [fic for today](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10403067) is wonderful, and you should absolutely read it (and everything else she's done during McReyes Spring Break)!
> 
> The wonderful SMRSNOW has made [some GREAT fanart](https://twitter.com/Grey_paper/status/1016358401700315137?s=19) for this! I love it so so much. ♥

The hideout of Jesse McCree, notorious outlaw, isn't home. It wasn't ever going to be, and Jesse's not fool enough to expect it to be--it's a place to hang his hat, to lay low, to go to ground if need be, not a place where he lives. Still, he does his best to make it livable, with a real (if cheap) bed, a little fridge and a hotplate, a tiny table and one chair, most of a sofa, and a small potted cactus he keeps on the table by the hideout's single, slightly-grimy window.

The cactus surprises him. He's never really been a plant person, but he's not around enough for anything that's not ultra-low maintenance, and having something to keep alive feels like a pleasant counteraction to all the killing that happens in his line of work. It's not the same thing, not at all, but sometimes he whispers to the cactus when he waters it and feels like maybe things aren't as terrible as they could be.

.

He's at the hideout when the news breaks about the explosion in Zurich--the Overwatch HQ in flames, Morrison dead, Reyes dead too. He confirms the news with three independent sources and one frantic call to Stef Valdez (no answer, _shit_ ) and realizes, deep down, what this means. He doesn't remember much of the day after that, besides heading for the closest bar.

He wakes up the next morning with what's possibly the worst hangover of his life, lying on the floor of the hideout in a puddle of what's hopefully just vomit but doesn't smell promising. He manages to crawl to the bathroom before he pukes again. When he's sure his stomach is empty, he stumbles into the shower, where he stands until the water runs cold, sobbing, as the realization hits him again: Gabe Reyes is dead, Jesse had abandoned him, and now there's nothing either of them can do.

(He's glad his stomach is empty; the thought of Gabe dying alone, thinking Jesse didn't care about him, makes Jesse sick enough that he dry-heaves.)

When he finally forces himself out of the shower, all cried out and numb in more ways than one, he finds a message notification blinking on his tablet and a second small cactus sitting on the table in a jet-black little pot. There's a sticky note on it; Jesse doesn't remember writing it, but it's in his handwriting, block letters that say:

**GABRIEL  
(DON'T LET THIS ONE DIE)**

Jesse had _thought_ he'd been all cried out, but one last sob escapes him now, and he sinks into the chair by the table and puts his head in his hands.

His tablet beeps insistently. He's got one message, from an anonymous sender. Desperate for any kind of distraction, Jesse opens it. Its body is a single sentence, _you need to see these_ , and it has a compressed archive file named UN_BLACKWATCH_DATA attached--certainly a distraction. Jesse's curious, but he's not an idiot; he scans the archive file for fifteen different types of malware before transferring it an old tablet and then disconnecting that tablet from the network and, finally, opening the file.

His precautions seem to be unnecessary, because the files are exactly what it says on the tin, years and years of Blackwatch mission reports, finance data, agent profiles. The files are annotated with the UN findings, and since Jesse's not sure what exactly it is that he 'needs to see' in these files, he starts there. He spends the next several days at the table, poring through the files, really only getting up to eat and briefly sleep and sometimes not even that. This is what Gabe had been looking into when Jesse had left Blackwatch; maybe now, with everything in the light, Jesse can figure it out and somewhere, somehow, Gabe can be at peace.

.

It's the third straight day he's spent staring at his tablet and the sun is just peeking up over the windowsill, Cactus Gabe casting strange shadows across the pile of papers Jesse's been using to take notes. He's going through the list of missions whose funds had been misappropriated, either in part or in full, and he stops on one in particular, whose description reads _AGENT RETRIEVAL, AUTHORITY G REYES_.

Jesse scratches at his chin, hides a yawn with the back of his hand. There are a number of entries in the list identical to this, each with the entirety of their funds siphoned off into a series of shell accounts that the UN couldn't quite track. Blackwatch had been hemorrhaging agents towards the end, even before Jesse had left, and Jesse had figured the entries on the list titled like this were just a convenience, some asshole forging Gabe's signature and pocketing the money. 

He clicks into the mission details on a whim; he doesn't expect to find his own photo staring back at him from the mission's attached files. It's a grainy picture, obviously pulled from a surveillance camera. The attached metadata tells him a date and that he'd been in South Dakota. He'd purposely let himself get captured on surveillance cameras a lot, back in the early days, knowing that Blackwatch could track him like that and hoping a little that they would. He hadn't wanted to go back, but maybe Gabe would find him, maybe they could talk. The post-debrief mission report says that an Agent Conway had been dispatched to look for him and hadn't turned up anything; the lack of a result is unsurprising, since literally all of the mission funds had gone elsewhere

With dawning horror, he goes back to the mission list and clicks on one of the other _AGENT RETRIEVAL, AUTHORITY G REYES_ missions, then another and another. All of them, every last one, was Gabe sending someone out to find him. They had started within a week of his leaving Blackwatch, and had gone on for as long as the UN had records, the last one scheduled for two days before the news of Blackwatch's existence had broken.

There are two possibilities, as far as Jesse can tell. First, that Gabe had been in on whatever sinister plot had been going on in Blackwatch, that he'd known that all these missions were shams and had kept sending them anyway, taking advantage of the facade of--grief? anger? to stuff more Overwatch money into someone else's pocket. Everything Jesse knows about Gabe Reyes screams at him that this isn't true, though, which leaves the second possibility: that Gabe really had thought that he was sending out these missions, that he'd wanted to find Jesse, that someone else had taken advantage of his anger or his grief for their own gain.

He looks up at Cactus Gabe, silhouetted in the early morning sun. "I thought he didn't find me because he wasn't looking, and he thought he didn't find me because I didn't want to be found," he says aloud, unable to believe the cruelty of it.

He shoves aside the rest of his notes, starts a new list, of agents mentioned in the missions to retrieve him. He knows he shouldn't. He can see the future stretching out ahead of him, a future he spends tracking these people down, working his way through whatever organization they belong to, dispensing vigilante justice until all of them have been dealt with. He knows that it won't--it can't--end happily for him, won't be as satisfying as he needs it to be, won't fix anything.

(It won't bring Gabe back.)

He's going to do it anyway.

.

"The look on her face!" Jesse tells the cactus, waving his mostly-empty glass of bourbon for emphasis, leaning in conspiratorially, "The look on her face when she opened the door and saw me, it was great. 'Wasn't so hard to find me after all!' I told her, and when she told me everything she knew, I shot her once, clean between the eyes." He makes a gun with the thumb and forefinger of his free hand, squints behind it like he's taking aim, mimes the shot with a little _pow_ noise.

He takes another long drink, puts his head on the table so he's eye-to-eye with the little pink bloom that Cactus Gabe has sprouted, the latest in a line of blooms over the last year and a half of Jesse's care. "I think... I think I may not be a good person anymore. Not sure I ever really was, not really, but at least I used to try. For a long time, my moral compass pointed due Gabe Reyes, and now that he's not here..." 

He trails off, and the cactus doesn't answer.

.

Jesse's surer now that he's not a good man, almost four years gone since the fall of Overwatch, but at least he manages to take care of his plants. No matter what he's doing, no matter where he is, he makes it back to the hideout to water Cactus Gabe and Cactus Gabe's nameless cactus friend.

Then, a stakeout turns into a kidnapping turns into several long months of undercover work before Jesse can get the intel he needs and get out alive. He limps back to the hideout covered in a layer of several-days-old soot and blood that one hopped train ride had done nothing to mitigate, and realizes when he's partway through undoing the hideout's complicated locks that he hasn't been back in far too long, that Cactus Gabe is probably--

He stumbles into the hideout, over to the table, fearing the worst. What he finds instead is Cactus Gabe, green and blooming, sticky note faded from the sunlight but still attached to his pot. The cactus friend is healthy too, with a small yellow blossom sprouting from one side--a feat Jesse had never managed in all the time he'd been caring for it--and a new sticky note attached to it:

**JESSE  
(DON'T LET THIS ONE DIE EITHER)**

The handwriting on the note is familiar and impossible, and the noise he makes is half-laugh, half-sob, all despair.

That night, there's a rustling noise in the hideout. Jesse is automatically awake, on his feet with Peacekeeper at the ready. He sees a shadow, then a flash of a silhouette.

"Who's there?" he asks the darkness, and when he looks again, the shadow is gone.

.

It is officially the worst Christmas Jesse has ever had. Previous years had been just as lonely, but he's run out of leads to follow on his Blackwatch project, the bounties have dried up, and he's a wanted-enough man that he can't even go to his usual Christmas bar. The bartender knows him there, hates his guts, it's great. The bar he's ended up in has no atmosphere, no atmosphere at all--you can barely tell it's Christmas.

At least the bartender lets him buy the whole bottle.

He's most of the way through the bottle when a woman pulls up a chair next to him and leans in to study him. Well. He's fairly sure she's a woman; three or four of her keep wobbling in and out of his line of sight, and the most he can say for certain about her is that she's very purple.

"Can I help you?" he asks, getting the words out mostly right the first time. He feels like a bug under a magnifying glass, and he scowls at her.

"It is, it's _you_."

His scowl deepens. "Oh good, you've seen the wanted posters."

"You're the one with the cactus!"

Jesse squints at her hard. No one should know about his cactus; to know that, they'd have to know about his hideout, and nobody knows about his hideout. How does she--

She continues, "I know someone you should meet."

.

He wakes up the next morning in his bed. He doesn't remember leaving the bar, but that's nothing new. He vaguely remembers a woman in purple telling him something important, but he doesn't remember what it was.

.

He wakes up two days later to find the Reaper in his hideout, seated on the most-of-a-sofa, his hands folded carefully in his lap. Jesse is immediately vertical, Peacekeeper out and trained on his uninvited guest. 

"The hell are you doing here?" Jesse asks, his voice gravelly with sleep, not at all as intimidating as he was hoping for.

"Making sure you water your plants," Reaper says quietly. The mask tilts up, regarding him. "Not sure what I'd do if you let Jesse die." He stands from the sofa, walks over to the table, puts one long talon under Cactus Jesse's single bloom and tips it up to examine it.

Jesse keeps Peacekeeper trained on him. "You've taken the blame for some of the Overwatch agents I killed," he says, watching as Reaper lifts Cactus Gabe, turns him around in his hands.

"Whoever they were, they must have needed killing, if you killed them," Reaper says. It sounds so simple when he says it. "I'm already the villain; it's easy enough for me to take the fall."

Jesse steps closer and lowers his gun slightly. "Who are you?"

Reaper chuckles, but it sounds unsure. "I think you already know."

"Show me."

Reaper sets down Cactus Gabe, lifts his hand to take off his mask. He turns slightly as the mask comes off, still hiding his face from Jesse. "You're sure?"

"Gabe," Jesse says, unable to keep the emotion from his voice. " _Please_."

He turns, and Jesse sees what's left of the face of the man that he loves. 

Jesse steps forward, sets Peacekeeper down on the table, moves into Reaper's--Gabe's--space. "I should've guessed. Only you could get Jesse to bloom," he says, and Gabe smiles.


End file.
